Max Beckmann, February 12, 1884–December 27, 1950, was a German painter, printmaker and sculptor, born in Leipzig. He studied at the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School in Weimar from 1900, first with Otto Rasch and then with Carl Frithjof Smith. In 1903 he moved to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Colarossi, where he attended classes infrequently.

Beckmann joined the Berlin Secession in 1907 and helped found the Free Secession in 1914. From 1925 he taught at Frankfurt’s School of Fine and Applied Arts, now the Städelschule. His students included Theo Garve, Karl Tratt and Marie Louise von Motesiczky. He moved to Amsterdam in 1937 and to the United States in 1947.

He taught at Washington University in Saint Louis and, from 1949, at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York. His works are held by the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Hamburger Kunsthalle and Museum of Modern Art in New York. He died in New York in 1950.

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